The latest move to improve Microsoft’s online advertising network can be seen in the new tests being tried out on the Bing advertisement formats. The tests, which are being run on a small percentage of the US market only, are combining the first two lines of text on their Bing search advertisements in order to make a much longer advertisement headline.

Why does Microsoft want to start running Bing advertisements with longer headlines? What is the advantage and why does the format look so familiar?In the first instance, the new, longer-headline Bing advertisement looks familiar because we have already seen Google try out a similar system via its Google AdWords advertising network. Google has been testing the effects of a very similar online advertising format for over a year, whereby the advertiser can choose to either add the advertisement URL to their advertisement headline or extend the headline using a more detailed description of the headline content.

As always seems to be the case, Microsoft is looking to Google to make improvements to its online advertising network and reaping the benefits of the pioneering efforts of the AdWords Advertising Team.

The advantages of a longer headline essentially lie in the fact that the potential online customer or client is given more information in the section of the advertisement that they read first. It is hoped that by receiving more information via the headline, the Internet user will be able to better decide which advertisements to click on. If the Internet user can make a more informed decision, they are happier with the service that they receive and the Internet advertiser drives a more optimized traffic to his or her website on a regular basis.

How can the Bing advertiser put these longer headlines into action?Firstly, remember that these new headlines are only being tested and are only available to certain parts of the US market. However, if you happen to fall into that category, this is how things work…

When the first sentence of the advertisement body text ends in a period, a question mark or an exclamation point, that sentence will be added to the headline with a hyphen acting as a separator between the two. However, if the same descriptive sentence is deemed to be too long, the advertisement URL will be added to the end of the headline instead. The “|” symbol will be used to separate the two sections of text in this instance.

Whenever the advertisement body text or the URL is promoted to the same line as the headline text, it is then left out in the later part of the advertisement. It’s a simple as that. It is also important to know that the tests being run on Bing are going to be run on the Yahoo Search Network in the near future too.

What is the most important thing for pay per click advertisers take away from this latest addition to the Microsoft online advertising service?The most important thing to take away from all of this is that Microsoft is always looking to Google to lead the way. Irrespective of the fact that the systems are not 100% the same, the new Microsoft advertising idea is definitely rooted in the tests that Google has been running via the AdWords Network for over a year.

Therefore, if you are looking to become involved in pay per click advertising and looking to promote your business via an online marketing campaign, the best of the best will always be found at Google. Google is the online advertising innovator and it seems as though this is a fact that’s not going to change any time soon.